By Osita Chidoka
Mekaria,
It was 7.30pm ” Ossy I dont know what they are saying oooo; they said Uncle Ojo is sick” It was my wife, Chidinma. “Is it not Ojo? He will be fine,” I responded.
“I think it is serious; you should go to the hospital,” she said. Something in her voice unsettled me; I was worried. Her voice was ominous.
I called John, Chief Ojo’s Personal Assistant; he picked and was wailing uncontrollably. I cut the call. I headed to Chief Ojo’s house at Mabushi. On my way, Gov Rotimi Amechi called: “Osita, is it true?” Gov Ikpeazu called, and my phone kept ringing. It was true. Ojo was dead.
I dealt with my grief through a series of articles I titled Conversations with Ojo. Today, the conversations continue.
Ten years ago I wrote to you out of the rawness of grief, when every room still carried your shadow, and every book, every glass of wine, every passage of classical music, every argument about Nigeria ended in the same unfinished question: what would Ojo have said?
On 29 July 2016, you departed this world only two days before the seventieth birthday of Ucha and her twin sister Nnenna, so that what we had prepared as a celebration became, in a single stroke, a service of songs, and House 22 filled with people who had come to rejoice and stayed to mourn, full of bodies yet emptied of your laughter.
Today we are back in Abuja, and this time the calendar has been kinder, for Ucha and Nnenna are eighty and the house is alive again, with Ulari, Ugwuji, Uma, Ukiwe and Nnanna, with Charles and Yewande, and with your grandchildren threading through the chairs, so that there is laughter and conversation and thanksgiving, everything arranged exactly as you would have wished it, save for the one familiar voice we keep listening for and cannot hear.
In the ten years between that service and this celebration, time has done what time always does. Some of those you loved have gone ahead to find you: my father-in-law, Oscar Amogu, has departed, Evangelist Uma Ukpai has gone, and your dear friend Ferdinand Agu has crossed over too, one generation quietly, almost without our noticing, handing the baton to the next.
And yet, Mekaria, something far more remarkable has happened in these years, for you are still here, not in the way grief once begged for you to be, but in the only way that has ever truly mattered, which is that your ideas have outlived you.
Your insistence that public office is a trust and not a harvest still governs the decisions I make in rooms you will never enter; your belief that integrity is the only wealth that survives the loss of power remains the compass by which I steer; and your restless, almost ungovernable curiosity still rises to meet me every single time I walk into a bookshop and feel you reading over my shoulder.
Most of all, Mekaria has ceased to be merely the name your friends called you and has become an idea with a life of its own, living now in the Mekaria Institute of Technology and Administration in Obosi, in the Mekaria Mentorship Programme, and in a growing philosophy that labours to prepare Africans to lead with knowledge, with character and with service.
The conversation we once held across a dinner table has become an institution, proving that ideas, when lived faithfully enough, eventually outgrow the men who first spoke them.
Your protégés carry the journey forward, each in his own way and on his own terrain. Sam Amadi, Okey Ikechukwu, Emma Anosike and many others continue to shape ideas, mentor younger Nigerians and contribute to the national conversation. None of them became copies of you, and that perhaps is the greatest mark of a true mentor. You taught people how to think, not what to think. In each of them I can still trace a strand of your intellectual DNA, stubborn and unmistakable.
You once challenged me to look beyond success and reach instead for significance, and I confess I understand that distinction far better now, having since carried the weight of choices you would have recognised at once, than I did when you first set the thought before me.
The Greeks, you used to remind me, understood that a man dies only when his name is spoken for the last time. By that measure, Mekaria, you are gloriously, defiantly alive, for your books still speak, your speeches still teach, your ideas still provoke, and your example still guides those of us who knew you and many who never did.
So it is that now and again, when I uncork a worthy bottle, stumble upon an extraordinary book, or wrestle late into the night with yet another difficult question about this country we both refused to give up on, I hear, as clearly as I ever did, that familiar greeting, “Osita nwannem…”, and the conversation continues from where we left it.
Happy eightieth birthday to Ucha and Nnenna.
And thank you, Mekaria, for proving with your own life that to live in the minds of men is, in the end, the only immortality worth achieving. Your life proved that ideas can outlive power, institutions can outlive their founders, and conversations need not end with death.
Until we meet again, the conversation continues.
